On Monday, the national French daily, Les Echos, published a lengthy article on Desertec, the Malthusian solar panel project in the Sahara launched by the Club of Rome, which is the direct anti-project against the NAWAPA perspective, and which has been exposed as "genocidal" by the LaRouche movement. Les Echos indicates, however, already in its kicker, that it "poses serious political questions. The evil mind behind this project is Gerhard Knies, of Switzerland, a member of the Club of Rome. He claims that since 90% of the global population lives less than 3,000 km from a desert area, building some 30 of these thermal solar "super plants" would supply enough power to supply mankind’s current needs, using 20 square meters of desert per capita. Desertec expects to contribute 15% of the electrical power needed by the EU in 2050, and if it isn’t enough, it proposes to add windmills and biofuels!

Some 17 industrial groups from Europe have already bought into the "production" aspect of Knies’ idea, assembled for the purpose by insurance giant Munich Re, which was instrumental in organizing Desertec along with the German Association of the Club of Rome, among them predominantly German firms like ABB, Deutsche Bank, E.ON, Siemens, MAN Solar Millennium, RWE, and others; the electricity produced by Desertec is supposed to be transported over a grid from the desert to Europe by a French-led consortium group, which includes the French cable company, Nexans, and the country’s leading power producer Electricité de France (EDF).

That project, proposed by a company called Transgreen, was recently adopted by the 43 members of the Union for the Mediterranean at their meeting in Cairo, who integrated it into its "Mediterranean solar design, which plans to provide 20 GW by 2020. But not even every solar panel producer is for the project: Solarworld, the number one in Germany, denounced the project as politically "dangerous," the generating plants are located in Muslim Arab and North Africa countries, that are as unstable as those from which oil is extracted.